Mobile telephone networks provide a variety of services and functions beyond simple direct voice communication. Once scarce and expensive, mobile communication devices are now so common that many people own at least one. Accordingly, cellular telephone manufactures and operators strive to continually provide new and innovative services in an attempt to keep existing customers and draw in new customers in an industry that is very competitive.
GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) standards provide a way of establishing data connectivity between mobile devices. For a GPRS network, the allowed QoS (quality-of-service) is usually pre-provisioned on a per-subscription basis and is fixed, since there is limited QoS support available. On the other hand, UMTS network services are much more flexible in terms of QoS by providing at least four types of traffic that include a conversational class (e.g., voice, video telephony, video gaming), a streaming class (e.g., multimedia, video on demand, webcast), interactive class (e.g., web browsing, network gaming, database access), and background class (e.g., email, SMS-short message service, downloading).
However, there is no commercial QoS service for directing WWAN (wireless wide area network) service to a selected bounded area. Moreover, there is no partition capability of coverage. Conventionally, the service coverage is either on or off for the whole sector. Use can be made of narrow beam antennas or repeaters to focus on one particular area, but this is not QoS-based and coverage cannot be confined to a bounded area.